Sunday, April 17, 2011

Twitter suspends QualityPoint Application also. Trouble @Twitter?

Twitter is providing an API for creating third-party applications by accessing Twitter data.

Thousands of (Around 750,000) third-party Twitter applications/clients are available. Even some applications are more popular than Twitter's own web interface.

Even if these third-party applications helped Twitter to grow fast, Twitter had decided to ban these third-party applications.

Twitter had started this third-party clients ban starting from Ubermedia clients such as UberTwitter and Twidroyd.

And, Twitter had asked the Developers to stop building clients. Engadget has mentioned that Twitter is implementing these restriction to start monetize its services. Engadget has given title as "Twitter to developers: we want to own the pipes, water, and faucets, but feel free to make soap" for this news.

But yesterday, I got an email from Twitter saying that "This is a notice that your OAuth token for QualityPoint has been suspended from interacting with the Twitter API."

Since all our Twitter clients use this application, nothing is working now.

As Twitter starts hating third-party Twitter applications, I am planning to reduce our focus on developing Twitter clients/applications. Instead, I am planning to focus more on developing our jobsite. We already introduced Resume Posting service, and working on to release lot of new features including meta job search engines for regular jobs and freelance jobs. Since the Social media sites get revenue from job advertisements, I think running job site is wiser than working with other social media sites such as Twitter which won't hesitate to ban any developers to monetize their services..

If anyone wants to start their own Resume posting service, you can contact me.

As the Twitter is the good source for getting huge traffic easily, I am analyzing the all the possibilities of using Twitter effectively even after they suspended our application. I will publish my detailed plans soon. And, if anyone wants to buy our Twitter applications, you can contact me. (As of now, the demo won't work as Twitter has suspended our application. You can test it after updating with your application credentials)

And, I can give our Twitter scripts with 80% discount for the buyer who is willing to share his twitter application to bring up our Demo immediately. (Update- The demo is up and running now using new twitter API keys)

Apart from our Twitter application, few of our Twitter accounts also got suspended.

But I didn't get any mail from Twitter about this account suspension. So, I had sent below message to twitter support "suspended@twitter.com".

Today I have noticed that my twitter account rilBp got suspended. I have
gone thro' twitter rules. I couldn't see any violation in my account. Can
you solve this issue as soon as possible?

And, I got below reply from Twitter Support Team.

Hello Rilbp!

We understand that you're contesting an account suspension. Please be sure to read
this entire email; you will need to take further action in order to reopen your
ticket and trigger a review of your account.

Twitter suspends accounts for a variety of reasons:

• If your account was suspended for aggressive following behavior, you should have
received an email notification to the address associated with your Twitter account.
You'll need to confirm that you've removed all prohibited following automation from
your account, and will stop any manual aggressive following behavior. To expedite
your appeal process, please review our Best Practices page if you haven't already
(http://support.twitter.com/entries/68916), and then reply to this ticket with a
confirmation that you understand our policies and will not engage in any prohibited
following behavior.

• If you didn't receive an email indicating why your account was suspended, please
take a minute to review the Twitter Rules (http://www.twitter.com/rules). If you
suspect you've been suspended for another reason, please reply to this email with a
short explanation.

• While we strive to avoid mistakes, it's also possible that your account was
suspended in error. If after reviewing the Rules, you have no idea why your account
was suspended, just reply to this email indicating as much, and we'll take another
look at your case. Our apologies if the error turns out to be ours.

Thanks,
Twitter Trust & Safety

Since I didn't find any appropriate reason from the links provided by the Twitter Support Team, I sent below reply.

I have gone thro' your links.
But, I couldn't understand why it got suspended. So, I think there may be
a technical issue from Twitter side.
Can you solve it as soon as possible?

And, I got below reply from Twitter support team.

Hello,

Your account was suspended because it appears you may be managing a number of
Twitter accounts. Creating serial or bulk accounts with overlapping uses is a
violation of the Twitter Rules; as a result, all of the accounts created have been
suspended pending more information being provided.

Please respond with the following information:

a) a list of the accounts that you have created and which of these you would like to
have reinstated, and
b) your planned use for the accounts.

The Twitter Rules can be found here: http://support.twitter.com/articles/18311

Thanks,

artie

I sent below reply, and this time I put cc to biz@twitter.com and ev@twitter.com

Artie,

Thanks for your reply.

Actually, I represent a Software/Web development company "QualityPoint
Technologies". We are developing websites and selling them. And, we
develop many scripts also.

Mostly we use Twitter accounts to use for our new sites. For example this
account @rilBp is created to use with http://rilbp.info/

And, we have created few Twitter accounts for tweeting News/jobs collected
from various RSS sources using Yahoo pipes and Google feedburner socialize
option.

I had set-up a Team to manage these things. Our Team has searched lot of
RSS feeds and created mash-ups, they were ready to feed them to related
Twitter accounts once after testing it.

Since almost all our Twitter accounts are suspended now, I feel that our
Time/effort spent on creating the Feeds are useless now. Even our team has
started creating images/logos required for twitter accounts.

Please note that I had started this project and set-up the Team only after
going thro' the Twitter Terms/rules and I had asked our Team to follow it
strictly.

I never wanted to spam Twitter or any other system, as I know spamming
won't give any benefit to anyone. And, we create accounts manually only.
Since many people are there in our Team, they might have created similar
account. Anyway, they will be having their own set of RSS feeds. So, I
don't think that we are violating any Twitter Terms/rules.

Anyway, I hesitate to continue this project as I realized the Risk of
depending on the Twitter for our business.

And, it is really very difficult to give lists asked by you.
Because some accounts are created by our Team for our users/customers. i-e
our team assist our users to create/manage Twitter accounts as they are
not technically strong enough to handle twitter accounts. I can not take
ownership for those accounts even if we need to manage them.

If possible, you can reinstate all or most of our suspended accounts.
Anyway, it is not much important, because I realized the risk of depending
on Twitter for our business and I realized the loss. Again, I don't want
to spend more effort/time on Twitter to meet another loss. Instead, I am
planning to concentrate on our other projects such as job search engine
developments.

If I have violated any Twitter rule/terms, I can confidently continue
using Twitter once it is un-suspended. But, based on my understanding, I
haven't violated Twitter Rules, but facing difficulties with Twitter. So,
I am hesitating to put my time/effort or our team time on Twitter related
tasks in future.

It seems Twitter support is very active and they they are sending reply quickly.

And a notable point is, our application "qualitypoint" got suspended after I had done these communications with Twitter about our Twitter Account suspension. I am NOT sure whether there is any relation between them. If you know more details, you can share your comments.

It looks like Twitter is in Trouble. Fortune magazine has done a detailed analysis about Twitter and published an article Trouble @Twitter.

It says that Boardroom power plays, disgruntled founders, and CEO switcheroos are clipping the wings of this tech high flier.

And, It says,

Just two years ago Twitter was the hottest thing on the web. But in the past year U.S. traffic at Twitter.com, the site users visit to read and broadcast 140-character messages, has leveled off. Nearly half the people who have Twitter accounts are no longer active on the network, according to an ExactTarget report from January 2011

Business Insiderhas described this as "The Truth About Twitter's Troubles" .

The story touches on Twitter's lack of revenues, its management discord, its relatively small user-base, and its refusal to accept huge multi-billion dollar offers from the likes of Google and Facebook.
The truth about these troubles is that the company, operating under new CEO and a re-constituted board since last fall, knows it has them, and is re-organizing the entire company around fixing them.

So, it seems Twitter is facing high pressure from media to improve the quality of tweets. That may be the reason Twitter suspending third-party applications and twitter accounts rigorously. But I think, this unplanned and inappropriate suspensions will do more harm to Twitter than doing any help. What do you say?

Till now I didn't get any reply from Twitter regarding reactivating our Twitter application. So, I have decided to choose web based access than using API.
Our Team is good in creating web based scripts. For example, we have created a script which will automatically post resume to around 60 job sites.
So, We have started creating scripts for sending tweets without using API. Currently we are testing it. I will give more details once after completing it.Updates on May 07th
We have resolved the issue by registering new twitter application. Anyway, we are ready with script for the web based also.

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